Solid State Drives (SSD) offer high performance and low latency and for this very reason, storage admins are now evaluating the need to deploy SSD in their IT environment. There are also other reasons why SSDs are better for certain environments – speed, high availability, faster file access, quick to boot up, and so on. Storage admins often fire fight,...

In today’s business world, the need for protecting sensitive data has significantly risen for countless organizations, whether it be a restaurant or a firm that develops software for the military. Moreover, the rapid growth of the Internet has made it easier to access data, which ultimately leads to the misuse of this vital information. Therefore, certain parameters must be set...

SolarWinds® has reached yet another milestone by launching the latest version of Server & Application Monitor (SAM). Before we get in to the details of what comes with the new release, we just want to remind you that SAM has a broad coverage for monitoring over 150+ applications. It also provides monitoring capabilities for select SMEs (DBAs and Exchange admins)...

Continuous application availability and performance, as well as a secure and compliant infrastructure, are what all IT admins want, so their customers don’t point fingers at IT efficiency and service. Having an application-centric approach for IT staff in hospitals, doctors’ clinics, nursing homes, and other healthcare centers helps ensure critical applications are always available and running optimally to enable the...

If you’ve attended a recent TechEd or MMS, and you follow the event hashtags, you probably saw references to the Twitter Army. myITforum is a fantastic on-line community for IT pros who are focused on Microsoft technologies. myITforum has also been very successful in fostering community at live events via the Twitter Army. The Twitter Army is beneficial to everyone...

The ‘replication’ feature from Microsoft Exchange Server enables high availability for Exchange Server data. With replication, a duplicate copy of the database is stored at a remote location, and data from this database can be used in the course of planned or unplanned downtime. However, this feature is useful only when it runs without issues. Exchange is one of those...

For those of us looking at the best storage options for our data center – both physical and virtual – we tend to look at options that are viable and cost-effective for our IT setup. In most cases, it’s recommended to adopt either block level or file level storage, and to determine whether these levels support your virtual environment. This...

In today’s corporate networks, DHCP services can be utilized to eliminate time-consuming, error-prone manual IP assignments. As a result, the IT administrator’s day-to-day job becomes much easier. The primary goal of an administrator is to ensure that a DHCP server is properly deployed, maintained, and managed for good performance and availability. When deploying a DHCP solution, administrators must consider several...

SaaS or Self-Hosted? It’s the question every IT pro has asked over the last few years as they’ve rolled out new IT management solutions. The reasons for and against SaaS offerings are pretty well known by this point, so at the end of the day, what most IT pros want to know is which provides the best value. In light...

Typically, if you’re running a Windows environment, chances are you’re using Microsoft IIS as your Web server to run your Web applications. To ensure IIS servers are up to speed and performing exactly how you want them to, you should consider monitoring key metrics. This will help track performance problems, so you can fix issues as they occur. When you...

It’s a new month and a new year so be sure to visit the SolarWinds thwack community for some valuable IT management tips and of course enter to win big in this month’s thwack mission. What is thwack? It’s an online community that lets you interact with over 130,000 community members to discuss technology, exchange ideas about IT management, and...

Tuning your SQL server is important because it can impact overall server performance. Tuning expensive queries is imperative because your database server’s performance can be affected by a slow and unresponsive query. Monitoring the performance of each query in SQL server is key – for example, if a single query is taking time to respond, you’ll know CPU utilization is...

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If the Surface 3 and Surface 2 are third cousins then the Surface Pro 3 is the big brother to the Surface 3 with the Surface Pro 3 being a little faster and a little bigger in all specifications. read more […]

While the Surface 3 follows the naming scheme of the Surface 2 it is not a follow on in the Surface 2 product line. This is an entirely new product with better capabilities, hardware and functionality but a few steps below the Surface Pro 3 itself. The Surface 2 and Surface 3 are like third cousins. They come with the same familial connection but are very di […]

Well ask and you shall receive. Windows insiders became quite vocal during the 54 day drought of no new Windows 10 Technical Preview builds between 23 January and 18 March. In return Microsoft listened and said they were reevaluating how they use the Fast Ring for updated builds and that effort showed up yesterday afternoon. read more […]

To enable the data-driven enterprise, IT organizations are moving rapidly to a services-based cloud model. This white paper highlights the challenges of controlling data in hybrid as-a-service IT environments and suggests that data control in hybrid IT should be looked at as a framework rather than as a single effort. read more […]

Just like you can create policies for users, you can create policies for phones In a Lync Enterprise Voice deployment, you need to protect the phones being used by multiple users or the public. read more […]

Hello, I am looking for SCCM 2012 report which shows disk space used by all folders under C:\ or D:\ drive and excludes C:\windows, C:\program files and C:\program files (x86) folders. Is there any custom mof available so I can add/import in […]

I need help scripting on 64bit OS.. I am using SMS Installer but need help executing or navigating to the 64bit side of the windows OS? Also is there any scripting software that supports both 32bit and 64bit scripting compiling .exe? […]

Hello everyone, I'm facing a frustrating issue that is slowing progress moving forward with SCCM 2012 R2 CU4 in my environment because I can't get systems to patch consistently. I have a small environment with a single physical site server and loc […]

I have a few device collections full of servers that have already received clients. I wanted to know if there is a way to change the settings in software center for all devices in a device collection vs having to remote into each server and do it manuall […]